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SILENT NIGHT

Who better than Clark, the patron saint of damsels and children in distress, to reheat the milk of human kindness in this Christmas fable for the '90s? Waiting on line to look at the Christmas Eve displays in the windows at Saks Fifth Avenue, Brian Dornan sees somebody in the crowd pick up the wallet his distracted mother Catherine has just droppeda wallet containing hundreds of his sick father's dollars and the St. Christopher medal Catherine's own mother insisted would help Tom Dornan battle his leukemia. Since he can't get his mother's attention, Brian takes off after the thiefnot knowing that she's Cally Hunter, the terrified sister of Jimmy Siddons, a cop killer who's just shot his way out of Rikers Island and is planning to stop off at his sister's for whatever fast money he can cadge en route to Canada and freedom. In the twinkling of an eye, Jimmy has made off with Brian and the Christopher medal; Cally, who unwisely helped Jimmy the last time he was on the lam, is sweating bullets about whether to tip off the hard-bitten police detectives and—if she gets sent up the river—risk dooming her own daughter to a foster home; Catherine is broadcasting heartrending radio appeals for her son; and cops from every corner of New York are looking for Jimmy. Catherine, who doesn't share her mother's faith in St. Christopher, is frantic, but you won't be unless you're new to Clark's world of Reader's Digest suspense; after all, with one possible exception, Jimmy Siddons is the only person in the sovereign state of New York who isn't basically a nice guy, and what chance does evil have against a team like that? Clark's huge audience, nostalgic for the days when Christopher was a fully accredited saint, are bound to swallow this winsome fantasy in a single gulp before the Christmas turkey is cold. (First printing of 750,000; Literary Guild main selection; author tour)

Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1995

ISBN: 0-684-81545-1

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995

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PLEASE SEE US

A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.

In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.

They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.

A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.

Pub Date: March 3, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

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